KiKu—the duo of Yannick Barman and Cyril Regamey, who first met at the Lausanne Conservatory—opened their trajectory with Marcher sur la tête. The project set voice and text at the centre, taking Georg Büchner’s “Lenz” as a point of departure: a walk through the Vosges in dank fog; nature as surreal and forbidding; time and space unmoored, anxiety close at hand. KiKu seize key passages and scatter them through music that is dreamy, delirious, sometimes idyllic yet always driven, with David Doyon’s electrifying guitar pushing the material to the edge of the imaginable. You hear Lenz’s nightly plunges into ice water, his self-harm—vain attempts to affirm an objective reality—brought into sharp relief by the voice of Blixa Bargeld (Einstürzende Neubauten), who leads listeners through this narrative universe as a seductive agitator. The result is an intense weave of poetry and musical adventure. Their second album, Eng, Düster und Bang (feat. Blixa Bargeld & Black Cracker), turns to Jean Paul—specifically the “first flower piece” from Flower, Fruit and Thorn Pieces, the “Rede des toten Christus vom Weltgebäude herab, dass kein Gott sei.” Long carried by Blixa Bargeld, the text becomes the basis for a new collaboration: a cemetery vision one summer evening; graves opening; a quake; the church swaying; a cosmic mass where Christ descends and pronounces a single line—“There is no God.” KiKu split the text into a suite of pieces where propulsive, richly textured grooves meet ecclesiastical-tinged melodies in a suggestive maelstrom. As on the debut, Black Cracker appears at points as narrator, his striking, personal poetry widening the acoustic field Barman and Regamey shape—melancholy and elemental drive offset by glimmers of choral light and playful clouds above a world in anxious turmoil. The music reads as a cosmic, religious—indeed ideological—vision: timely and timeless at once.